How France protests could ignite a wider European revolution

Europe is aflame with mass protests. Two governments have already fallen. 

After 14 years, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic was rudely shoved aside by a movement of mass popular resistance. And Pedro Sanchez, the Spanish prime minister, was forced to call an early general election after huge demonstrations over housing.

But these are far from the only revolts on the continent. From Portugal to Albania, and Belgium to Italy, huge numbers of citizens, often led by students, are taking to the streets. 

On 30 October, they were joined by an international strike of dock workers, affecting 113 ports in 22 countries. The strikes and protests were against rearmament and the new drive to war, and in solidarity with Palestine. Some of the most effective of these demonstrations took place in Italy and Greece. 

In Italy, Serbia and Spain, the mobilisations are on the same scale as the more widely reported (at least in Britain) protests in France. But it is France that is the key to European politics - and here’s why.

The mass protests in France have already lasted more than a month. Despite severe repression - with thousands arrested, while one protester lost sight in an eye, and another two each lost a hand - there is no sign that they are stopping. 

Moreover, this huge mass movement is increasingly gaining working-class and trade union support. A general strike is planned for 5 November. How much actual strike action it will involve is unclear, but it will certainly be a huge day of union-backed street protest.

There are other ways in which the political crisis in France is the most advanced in Europe. 

Political establishments faced with this kind of opposition on the streets typically deploy two mechanisms to defeat their opponents: force and electoralism.

The French government has tried using considerable force, but it hasn’t worked - at least not yet. The French state has toyed with the idea of a total ban on marches, and the right are trying to outlaw Jean Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) party, though they have not yet dared to do so. 

That leaves electoralism as a strategy to break the momentum of popular mobilisation and to reconfirm the legitimacy of government. This is a tried and tested establishment manoeuvre in democratic nations. 

Mass popular mobilisation on the streets, the hallmark of protest movements for the last generation, is a fundamentally radical and transformative process 

In Spain, Sanchez’s Socialist Workers’ Party clearly hopes that the momentum of the housing protests and fear of gains by the populist right Vox party will bolster its electoral performance. It’s a dangerous gamble that may let in the right - or it could just be enough to buy the reformist leftist government another term in office. 

In Italy, the protests are clearly aimed at getting rid of the far-right Meloni government. If they are successful, a centrist government of some sort would be the likely outcome, given the current weaknesses of Italy’s leftist parties.

In Britain, the tidal wave of the Palestine movement was substantially responsible for unseating Keir Starmer as prime minister. But the Labour Party provided an equally centrist, if more personally appealing, substitute in Andy Burnham. 

In France, however, electoralism is a much weaker option for the political establishment. Emmanuel Macron’s presidency was meant to reconstruct the centre ground on the Blairite model, isolating both the left and the populist right. But the very opposite has happened. 

Both the left, coalesced around Melanchon’s LFI, and the populist right of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally have profited from the collapse of the centre. Thus far, LFI has shown no appetite for the kind of compromise with the political centre that has bedevilled other European leftist projects, from Syriza in Greece to Podemos in Spain.

Presidential elections are already underway in France, with polling next year - so the option of calling an election that disrupts the momentum of the protest movement, as Charles De Gaulle did in in his “back me or sack me” election in 1968, or as Sanchez has done in Spain today, is not open to the French political establishment. 

Indeed, whoever wins the presidential election next year, the issue of who dominates French politics will rebound from the electoral sphere into the streets - because the left would not accept a National Rally victory, and the right would not accept an LFI victory. 

The stage is thus set for a monumental clash of social forces, which the electoral mechanisms will struggle to contain, and may well exacerbate.

Of course, France is not the only road to escalation of the broader struggle. Sanchez may win in Spain and fail to make enough concessions, thereby triggering another wave of protests; or he may lose, be blamed for paving the way for a Vox victory, and subsequently be sidelined. 

More generally, the engagement of the organised working classes, already growing, may result in widespread strike action. This would lift the crisis of European politics into a different register, making it much more difficult to smother the struggle by parliamentary means - though this would certainly not be impossible.

Regardless, it is still the case that, at the time of writing, the most advanced social and political crisis is in France.

There are a number of lessons to be drawn from that experience. The first is that mass popular mobilisation on the streets, the hallmark of protest movements for the last generation, is a fundamentally radical and transformative process whose effects cannot be reproduced by either traditional left electoralism or moralistic forms of direct action. 

Author John Berger was right when in 1968, he wrote: “The truth is that mass demonstrations are rehearsals for revolution: not strategic or even tactical ones, but rehearsals of revolutionary awareness. The delay between the rehearsals and the real performance may be very long: their quality - the intensity of rehearsed awareness - may, on different occasions, vary considerably: but any demonstration which lacks this element of rehearsal is better described as an officially encouraged public spectacle.”

The second lesson is that social democracy never dies of its own weaknesses; it has to be replaced. Many on the left believe that centrism will kill social democracy. But it won’t, because working people desperate for change will, quite rationally, accept the crumbs (or even the unfulfilled promise of crumbs) from social democracy if the only alternative is rampant conservatism, populism or fascism.

The third lesson is that any leftist electoral formation has to be insurrectionary in orientation. Melenchon’s LFI has unequivocally counterposed its project to the French state. That could change, since the LFI is not a declared revolutionary party. But so far, its insistence on standing with the masses in struggle has blocked the electoral route out of the crisis for the French ruling class.

The result has been the collapse of the French Socialist Party, which for the first time since its modern reincarnation in 1969 will not run a candidate from its own ranks for president, and of the Macronist attempt to rescue the political centre. 

That is why the political crisis in France is so severe - and a political crisis on this scale in France will radicalise the prospects of the left across the continent. 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.